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A Response to Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle has a long response up to my post on the Chicago Tribune and its misleading graphic on firing bad teachers. It’s much too long to excerpt so I will try to respond to what I see as Megan’s broader arguments. I want to start off by saying that I think we are working from very different premises, which in some ways makes this a difficult conversation to have.

For instance, I believe that focusing on teachers – and getting rid of bad teachers in particular – is a poor leaping off point for policy, and has been especially damaging under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. This focus on teachers not only turns people off to becoming teachers in the first place, it leads to a system of testing and accountability that is really anathema to a good, well-rounded education.

Megan, on the other hand, is arguing for an overhaul of the system in order to make improvements on the margins, and at the center of her critique – like so many others – are the teachers. Very broadly, her arguments are: teacher credentials are useless; everything a teacher learns about teaching they have pretty much mastered by year five; keeping more new teachers and fewer veteran teachers can help avoid teacher burn-out; high turnover is okay because of all these factors. We need to change compensation to lure in good new teachers who won’t stick around long enough to want pensions in the first place. Most importantly, we need to find ways to get rid of bad teachers and find great teachers.

These are two sides of the same coin.

On one side you lay a lot of the problems with our education system at the feet of bad teachers; on the other side you lay all the hopes of fixing our education system at the feet of really great teachers. And you spin the coin by measuring teacher performance. Then you shift gears and blame the teachers unions for protecting bad teachers that ought to be fired and dig into the all-too-deep trough of anecdotal evidence to dredge up a few examples of really bad teachers that were hard to fire.

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

Ms. Isaacson scores so abysmally because of the excruciatingly complex ‘value-added’ system of rating teachers that many cities have adopted in the wake of the accountability craze. Ms. Isaacson will not be able to receive tenure because of her low score despite the fact that she is considered by students, faculty and administration to be an excellent teacher. Now she’s considering leaving teaching altogether.

If we’re concerned about finding and keeping great teachers, perhaps we need to rethink how we measure their performance. Here is how New York runs its value-added scoring system:

Everyone who teaches math or English has received a teacher data report. On the surface the report seems straightforward. Ms. Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students were predicted to get a 3.69 — based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.

What you would think this means is that Ms. Isaacson’s students averaged 3.57 on the test the year before; they were predicted to average 3.69 this year; they actually averaged 3.63, giving her a value added of 0.06 below zero.

Wrong.

These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as “the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Right.

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Soon we will forget what it is that we are measuring to begin with – for our students, our teachers, our schools. Our public education system.

And here is where so many of our premises diverge. I don’t think the hopes or the failures of our education system can be laid at the feet of bad or great teachers. The vast majority of teachers are simply average teachers, and this will always be the case. When we are so quick to demonize teachers either directly or by suggesting time and again that if a student isn’t learning properly it must be the teacher’s fault, invariably, it leads contemporary reform advocates like Megan to write things like this:

focusing on improving teacher incentives may not solve everything, it does help us make things a little bit better. That’s important! Important enough to make teachers worse off in significant ways? I think so. The teachers are adults who can go somewhere else. The kids aren’t.

Making things worse for teachers won’t help students.

Taking away teachers’ pension plans, their job security, seniority, collective bargaining rights, pedagogical autonomy, cutting their pay, removing the requirement that they earn professional credentials – these things will not help students.

Even if you bring in new teachers with lots of verve who stick around just long enough to get to know the place before zipping off to their high paying jobs on Wall Street, this will not help students. These are fanciful ideas based on a few success stories out of Teach for America. The rest of the assertions – that teacher credentials don’t improve teaching skills, that teacher effectiveness plateaus after five years, etc. are all based around the assumptions of the modern accountability movement – that all learning and all success in education can be measured through tests.

I don’t buy it. I think it distorts the mission of public education beyond recognition.

The most successful education system in the world is probably Finland’s, and they have made teaching standards and credentials more exclusive and exacting, not less. In a system that is 100% unionized, Finnish teachers write their own tests and use them as guides for students who may need additional help. Teachers have autonomy and collaborate with one another extensively. They have a strong, standard curriculum and lots of flexibility in how to teach. Teachers are considered professionals in the same class as doctors and lawyers. I know everyone invokes Finland – but there’s a reason for that. If Finland is a shining example of how to do public education right, then America is fast becoming a cautionary tale.

If we were actually serious about getting great teachers into the classroom we would quit finding negative solutions, turning to punishment or to decreased standards. We would provide teachers with more support, more resources, and better pay. We would give them the tools they need to be effective educators, from autonomy in lesson plans and teaching methods, to strong curriculums from which to work from. More than anything, if we believe that great teachers will make the difference, we should compensate and respect teachers accordingly. Let’s drive good people into the profession rather than spending all our time trying to get bad people out.

Don’t ask teachers to teach to a test. If we want great teachers, make teaching a great job. As the following chart shows, even just in terms of compensation, we have a long ways to go to make that a reality – especially since we’ve been headed in the wrong direction for so long:

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Kain is right on target in his rebuttal statement. . His referral to the article written by Michael Weinrich(sp?) a reporter for the NYT who writes about this Gifted teacher who received a low rating is well taken. I think this original source should be quoted in the context of the article. I am not sure why the issue of teacher evaluation and blame for poor performing students are in the forefront of the news right now. It seems odd to me . As an educator and former teacher I realize how difficult it is to rate teachers. But education should be guided by educators and not by Politicians. It would be ludicrous for me to think I could run a big media company like Bloomberg News. Thank you Mr/Ms. Kain for an opinion well written.

Is there a reason that both you and McMegan completely ignore the question of whether or not most teachers stay with the profession too long? Given that we have studies showing that around 50% of teachers quit within their first 5 years, why is the front end of this discussion about increasing churn by taking on reforms that discourage longevity. Is the goal really just to ensure that schools have absolutely no institutional memory? This is just another case of McArgle not having any clue what she was talking about and thus advocating reforms that have no connection to the real world. I guess that isn’t too surprising.

However, one must wonder why anyone actually responds to anything she ever writes without immediately questioning its most basic underlying assumptions. It isn’t like we don’t already know that there will be something terribly off base there that just happens to tilt the argument inexorably to her predetermined policy preferences.

My point was that you let her start the argument from an assumption that there is very little turnover and that getting new blood into the system would be a change from status quo. Her argument is based on a flawed assumption. If you rebut that teacher longevity is important, but ignore the assumption that teacher turnover is rare, you are already having this debate on her terms.

It is like if McMegan argued that we should work to increase American caloric intake so that more Americans will be at or above healthy weight levels and you argue that being thin has some advantages as well, ignoring the fact that her entire argument is based on an absurd assumption. Specifically, she ignores the fact that Americans are overwhelmingly overweight.

I think a useful comparison can be made between the manufacture of cruise missiles and teaching young students. Cruise missiles are amazing feats of engineering, they can fly hundreds of kilometers unmanned, undetected, and hit a small target. The engineers who design and build these missiles are clever people but few might characterized as a geniuses. They are perfectly ordinary engineers working in an *extraordinary system*. The system is not dependent upon employing extraordinary individuals but rather lets ordinary engineers produce extraordinary results.

The same is true for teaching. What is needed is an excellent teaching system into which perfectly ordinary teachers can be placed and can produce excellent results.

However, at the end of the day when it comes to the NAACP vs Teachers’ unions, I side with the former. It’s unbelievably callous to say the current system is for the most part pretty good and to improve outcomes we should try expensive programs – the benefits disproportionally accrue to the wealthy, suburban, and white – while resisting most measures of accountability.

It’s the luxury of advantage, to choose reform that empowers teachers and hopes (while avoiding accountability or assessment) to improve the lot of others. I want the presence of justice in education and don’t believe that the obstinacy of educators is better for determining that timetable than the needs of the public, particularly the disadvantaged public. In a system that fails to achieve basic literacy and numeracy ought that determine our imperative?

However, at the end of the day when it comes to the NAACP vs Teachers’ unions, I side with the former. It’s unbelievably callous to say the current system is for the most part pretty good and to improve outcomes we should try expensive programs – the benefits disproportionally accrue to the wealthy, suburban, and white – while resisting most measures of accountability.

First off, I’m not sure what you’re actually saying here. Who is suggesting ‘expensive programs’ that only benefit the wealthy? If you check my latest post you’ll see that the turnover rates Megan wants to see actually cost billions of dollars already and that they effect the poorest schools and students the most.

Second, ‘most measures of accountability’ is just code for very specific current-reform measures of accountability. I reject the notion that the current crop of accountability ideas – teaching to tests, etc. – is the best way to rate teachers. Value-added metrics are terrible. And testing is itself quite flawed.

It’s the luxury of advantage, to choose reform that empowers teachers and hopes (while avoiding accountability or assessment) to improve the lot of others. I want the presence of justice in education and don’t believe that the obstinacy of educators is better for determining that timetable than the needs of the public, particularly the disadvantaged public. In a system that fails to achieve basic literacy and numeracy ought that determine our imperative?

Kyle – this is just a straw man. Nobody is saying that there should be no assessment of teachers. There as teacher assessment before NCLB and the current reforms. And do you actually have numbers showing that the “system” fails to achieve these things? Some very poor schools do, but again you’re just blaming the teachers while ignoring or glossing over the external factors. I’m left quite unsure what your point really is, or how you are answering any of mine.

School choice is a recipe for chaos. There are only so many seats in any given school. If a lot of students all want to go to the same school, there will not be enough room. Resource allocation is very difficult for schools to begin with but when any student can go to any school it just creates chaos.

I just want to say how excellent I think this blog is and that I’m so glad you’re writing it. Facts, substance, thoughtfulness, and reason–it’s a breath of fresh air. I plan to read it regularly and share it widely.

[...] E.D. Kain and Megan McArdle have been having a discussion on the firing of teachers. Erik, whose made a switch to the Left lately, seems against the idea, and Megan seems to be in favor of it. On the whole, I think Megan was more fair to the other side than Erik was who seems lately to not want to listen to any other views except those on the Left. [...]

Imagine a hospital in the African nation of Angola. This is the only hospital in the whole country, and it has intermittent electricity, a limited amount of antibiotics, absolutely no modern equipment and just a few very dedicated and overworked doctors. Many patients who come to this hospital die. Sometimes it’s because they live so far away that it was too late by the time they got there, sometimes because there is no medicine for them, and sometimes it’s because there are not enough beds or doctors to care for them.

Now, here is your task: we need to improve this hospital for the people of Angola. People are dying and it’s not good enough. To do this, we are going to focus on the doctors. We are sure that the reason people are dying is because the doctors are doing a bad job. It’s your job to figure out which are the good doctors and which are the bad ones, and then fire the bad ones.

1. How do you choose the good doctors from the bad doctors? We’ll give you a lot of money to figure out a complicated system for this. 2. Explain how firing these doctors is going to save lives a lot of lives in Angola. Again, we’ll give you a lot of money to theorise and make graphs and reports about this. 3. Can you think of a better way to save lives in Angola rather than blaming the doctors?

If you said that the best way to save the lives of Angolans is to provide more medicine, equipment and staff, then you and me are on the same page.

That means we will both agree that the best way to improve outcomes in schools is to provide the teachers with better resources and working conditions, and more time and resources, to enable them to get the best outcomes for their students.